PsyArXiv Preprints
June 15, 2025
David Rosenthal
1 citation
Quality spaces can objectively represent mental qualities by grounding them in perceptual discrimination rather than subjective introspection. Mental qualities have a robust connection to how organisms perceptually discriminate stimuli, allowing quality spaces to be constructed without relying on impressionistic subjective access. Subjective appearances of mental qualities are constitutively tied to perceptual roles, as each appearance consists in how it seems when perceiving a specific object type. Therefore, quality spaces based on perceptual role can also characterize subjective appearances, though the tie to perceptual role is more fundamental. These spaces primarily represent discriminable stimuli objectively, and secondarily represent corresponding mental qualities in terms of both perceptual roles and subjective appearances.
PsyArXiv Preprints
July 10, 2026
Visual imagery—the ability to see things in the mind's eye—ranges from extremely vivid (hyperphantasia) to absent (aphantasia). Analyzing data from 6436 online respondents, researchers largely replicated earlier differences between these extreme groups. Using latent class analysis on 3883 respondents who completed key measures, three subtypes of aphantasia emerged: 'global aphantasia' with extreme sensory features across most modalities; 'Aphantasia +' combining sensory and cognitive difficulties in autobiographical memory, face recognition, and spatial navigation; and 'non-global aphantasia' with milder uni- or multisensory features. These subtypes vary along three dimensions: the number and type of sensory modalities affected, the intensity of imagery loss, and the presence of additional cognitive difficulties. The findings call for new theoretical and methodological approaches to studying aphantasia.
PsyArXiv Preprints
July 9, 2026
A 6-week school-based mindfulness program for 122 adolescents aged 12–14 did not produce significant average improvements in anxiety, emotion regulation, well-being, mindfulness, psychological distress, or self-compassion compared to a control group. However, adolescents with higher neuroticism and lower extraversion were more likely to show improvements across multiple outcomes, including reduced anxiety and psychological distress and increased well-being and mindfulness. Lower openness also predicted improvement in psychological distress. The findings suggest that the program's benefits are concentrated among adolescents with greater baseline vulnerability, indicating that effectiveness depends on individual personality differences rather than universal effects.
PsyArXiv Preprints
July 9, 2026
School-based mindfulness trainings vary in effectiveness for adolescents depending on curriculum design, teacher qualities, developmental stage, and school context. Programs that include embodied mind-body practices and adequate practice dosage tend to work better. Teachers who personally practice mindfulness and engage relationally with students improve outcomes. Developmental factors such as age and metacognitive capacity matter, and assessment raises ethical challenges. Contextual influences at the school and sociocultural level also shape results. Assuming universal effectiveness overlooks these sources of variability and may explain null or negative outcomes in some studies. The paper offers a framework for future research and implementation.
PsyArXiv Preprints
July 6, 2026
Advanced meditation can cause wide-ranging psychological adverse effects, including cognitive and attentional disruptions, mood disturbance, anxiety, fear, adverse impacts on relationships and life trajectory, clinically significant psychiatric symptoms, trauma activation, and existential instability. These experiences depend on context and appraisal. Seven themes emerged from interviews with 28 advanced meditators: negative cognitive disruptions; negative affect; adverse life and relationship impacts; negative transformative experiences including clinical symptoms; foundational instability from insights; ambiguous context-dependent experiences; and resolution strategies like meditation techniques, teacher guidance, and social support. The findings indicate that meditative development, while also transformative, can produce significant challenges that require dedicated clinical frameworks and support structures.
PsyArXiv Preprints
July 5, 2026
The Svayoga approach, rooted in the Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali Yogasutra, and Yoga Vasistha, offers a model of seven interlinked themes for mental health. The 'Yogic perspective' emphasizes Consciousness, the play of triguna, suffering, and inner freedom; 'Self' differentiates outer and inner self; 'Experiences' explores klesha and the need for anasakti and samata; 'Sattvic qualities' focuses on personal growth; 'Karmayoga' examines desireless action; 'Interconnection' discusses shared Consciousness and ethical relationships; and 'Divine' explores sacred manifestations and spirituality. The model is expanded with ideas from other Indian texts and mystics. Empirical findings from applying the model for mental health are discussed.
PsyArXiv Preprints
July 3, 2026
Long-term meditation practice is linked to coordinated improvements across multiple mental-health domains, including well-being, emotion regulation, pain processing, stress resilience, and interpersonal functioning. A systematic review of 52 studies found that advanced practitioners show enhanced attentional control, reduced emotional reactivity, and increased compassion, supported by functional and structural brain changes in default-mode, salience, and frontoparietal networks. Beyond the brain, sustained meditation modulates the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenocortical axis, reduces inflammatory gene expression, and upregulates neuroplasticity-related molecular markers. These findings suggest meditation acts as a systemic brain–body intervention rather than a purely cognitive technique.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 25, 2026
A large online survey of 5,289 respondents mapped how seven types of inner speech co-occur across three scenarios. The 21-dimensional rating space is continuous, not categorical, organized into a text family and a voice pair, with own voice and visual imagery as standalone axes. The principal opposition is between own voice and visual imagery, refining dual-coding theory: the phonological half of verbal code opposes imagery, while the orthographic half is nearly orthogonal. Own voice forms an axis independent of other-voice, and the two carry opposite-signed agency associations. Free-text descriptions from 1,903 respondents corroborate this voice-led organization, providing a reference map for idiographic and clinical studies.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 24, 2026
Individuals maintain a coherent sense of self across bodily, relational, and developmental change through a higher-order organizational process called self-coherence, which integrates embodied experience, identity processes, personal meaning organization, and self-regulatory mechanisms. Unlike self-regulation, which supports adaptive responding to demands, self-coherence concerns the preservation of continuity and intelligibility across experience. The framework draws on embodied cognition, predictive processing, phenomenology, identity research, and constructivist approaches to personality, positioning self-coherence as a principle that bridges these accounts and explains how continuity is established, maintained, and restored across change.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 19, 2026
Visual mental imagery does not require the primary visual cortex (V1). A review of 55 published cases of cortical blindness finds that patients with complete or near-complete destruction of V1 still report vivid visual mental imagery. When imagery is impaired, the brain damage extends beyond V1, typically into the left temporal cortex. This contradicts the long-held assumption that visual imagery is perception in reverse and dependent on V1. Instead, the evidence points to a left temporal hub, the fusiform imagery node, along with other ventral temporal regions and frontoparietal networks, as the critical substrate for visual mental imagery.
PsyArXiv Preprints
July 16, 2026
A 14-week Yoga Nidra practice module significantly reduced depression, anxiety, and perceived stress while improving life satisfaction, flourishing, and peace of mind among 140 students at a premier technical institute in India, compared to a waitlist control group. Sleep quality deteriorated in the control group but remained stable in the Yoga Nidra group. Cognitive flexibility also improved more in the Yoga Nidra group. Qualitative analysis indicated that the practice shifted students from reactivity to response, fostering inner calm and holistic restoration.
PsyArXiv Preprints
July 16, 2026
A theoretical framework interprets immersive neurogastronomic experiences as a form of ambient cognitive modulation. Based on informal observation of approximately 6,000 guests over six years at Sensorium, an eleven-seat restaurant with controlled multisensory architecture, the authors propose that intentional, layered sensory overstimulation may selectively inhibit dominant analytical processing and reduce Default Mode Network activity, favoring a shift in brain oscillatory states from alpha toward theta. This hypothesized neurobiological shift, potentially observable within a single dining session, may correspond to heightened presence, reduced critical self-monitoring, and access to ordinarily unavailable inner states. A three-stage model—Saturation, Analytical Surrender, and Incorporeal Immersion—is introduced.
PsyArXiv Preprints
July 10, 2026
Frequent dream recall is associated with a higher likelihood of dream-reality confusion, according to a population-based survey of 4,961 adults. The association remained after controlling for age, sex, and lucid dreaming frequency. Individuals who recalled dreams more often also reported that dream-reality confusion experiences were more personally relevant and disruptive to daily functioning. The authors propose that limiting explicit recall of dream content may help maintain a clear distinction between internally generated and externally experienced events, potentially serving an evolutionary adaptive function by protecting against cognitive disruptions. Longitudinal and experimental studies are needed to determine whether dream amnesia plays a protective causal role.
PsyArXiv Preprints
July 10, 2026
As psychedelic use grows worldwide, some people experience extended post-psychedelic difficulties (EPPD), such as severe anxiety, depersonalization, persistent insomnia, HPPD, and PTSD-like symptoms. Current support from peer networks, integration services, and clinical care is fragmented, lacking shared definitions, triage protocols, or referral pathways, and few clinicians can treat EPPDs as psychiatric conditions. This essay maps the existing care ecosystem and proposes a coordinated framework with three functions—recognition, routing, and learning—and three working categories of difficulty: Acute Psychedelic Crisis, Short-term Integration Difficulties, and Extended Post-Psychedelic Difficulties. Four coordination pillars are suggested: coordinated public-facing presence, common minimal intake, shared learning, and outcome tracking. Voluntary, decentralized coordination among peer, clinical, and research organizations could build a psychedelic safety net for those who struggle, not only those who thrive.
PsyArXiv Preprints
July 7, 2026
Cognition and consciousness may arise from bidirectional interactions between neuronal spiking and rhythmic electric field activity (brain waves). Goal-directed behavior relies on top-down control to coordinate large neural populations into low-dimensional, task-oriented dynamics. Brain waves exert mesoscale influence over neural excitability, support analog computation, and flexibly route neural signals, enabling multifunctional neurons to assume context-dependent roles. Goal-directed thought, action, and unified consciousness emerge from cortex-wide wave dynamics that both reflect and transform spiking into coherent brain states.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 30, 2026
The essay identifies a theoretical and ethical risk in the current turn toward embodiment in neuroscience: the danger of collapsing selfhood into bodyhood, which can revive old reductions where "less body" implies "less self." Tracing historical debates on mind–body relations and examining empirical findings on embodiment, it argues that strong formulations of the embodied self may have troubling consequences when applied to bodies that are marginalized or do not meet the status quo. Rather than rejecting embodiment research, the essay calls for caution against its uncritical extension, underscoring the need to guard against theoretical slippage that may entail harmful social consequences.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 26, 2026
Undue influence is explained as the dynamic constraint of conscious agency through a process called Agency-Space Theory. Agency-space is the structured field where a person experiences possible thought, meaning, relationship, identity, and action. Undue influence occurs when external conditions narrow this field so that externally preferred outcomes become internally experienced as necessity, loyalty, morality, safety, or survival. The theory explains how control becomes internal constraint, how voluntary-appearing compliance can coexist with constrained agency, and predicts narrative and experiential effects such as reduced perceived alternatives, externally anchored meaning, altered self-other boundaries, and temporal narrowing. It also specifies complex-adaptive-systems implications including feedback loops, attractor-like patterns, path dependence, and hysteresis that may persist after exit.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 26, 2026
Two new experiments tested whether conscious observation of a stimulus influences its effect on behavior, as predicted by the Consciousness Causes Collapse (CCC) interpretation of quantum mechanics. A radioactive source determined stimulus primes, and reaction times were compared when primes were previously observed by a conscious agent versus shielded from observation. The CCC model predicts unobserved primes remain in superposition, reducing their priming effect. Both experiments showed a descriptive attenuation: a 59% reduction for X vs. blank and a 40% reduction for parallel vs. perpendicular designs, with the latter reaching statistical significance. A pooled analysis of six experiments found a significant interaction: observed primes produced larger priming effects than unobserved ones (p = 1.9 × 10⁻6), consistent with CCC predictions, though independent replication is needed.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 25, 2026
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) during sleep are emotionally distinct from both sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming, though they share more similarity with lucid dreams. Analyzing 658 emotional reports from 666 participant-by-experience-type reports, researchers found that sleep paralysis is characterized by high-arousal negative emotions like fear, terror, and anxiety, while lucid dreams are associated with happiness, love, hope, and sexual energy. OBEs are uniquely marked by peace, tranquility, and sometimes euphoria. The emotional profile of OBEs cannot be reduced to that of sleep paralysis, suggesting that emotional composition is a useful dimension for distinguishing these altered states of consciousness.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 25, 2026
Adolescents who use cannabis and also report psychotic-like experiences show reduced motivation to work for rewards, especially when the effort required is low or medium. Higher cannabis use was linked to more psychotic-like experiences, but only in adolescents with elevated tissue iron signal (1/nT2*), a marker of dopamine-related brain activity, in the putamen and thalamus. The findings suggest that cannabis use during adolescence may alter reward processing and dopamine-related neurophysiology in ways that depend on vulnerability to psychosis.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 20, 2026
Self-transcendent experiences—such as those induced by psychedelics, meditation, or awe—can be understood through a distinction between the reflective self and the experiential self. The reflective self involves conscious, narrative self-referential processing, while the experiential self involves affective processing and bodily awareness. Self-transcendence involves a decrease in the reflective self (ego dissolution) and an increase in the experiential self (immersion), supported by affective salience processing and associated with meta-awareness, leading to feelings of connectedness. This framework reconciles the paradox of feeling “smaller yet larger” during such experiences and offers a pragmatic model for researching the phenomenology of self-transcendence across different practices and cultural contexts.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 16, 2025
The visionary experiences of Saint Teresa of Ávila, described in her autobiography, closely follow a structured progression of inner light perceptions similar to those reported in meditation-induced phosphene phenomena. Her accounts of pure inner light and the Transverberation align with advanced phases of a six-phase taxonomy of phosphenes. Comparing her descriptions with those of Hildegard of Bingen and Tibetan yogis Milarepa and Longchenpa reveals a cross-cultural phenomenological consistency. This suggests that mystical luminosity experiences may arise from a shared neurophenomenological substrate underlying diverse contemplative traditions across time and culture.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 16, 2025
Dissociative experiences—like depersonalization or derealization—are common in young people and linked to worse mental health, self-harm, and suicide. This study tested brief cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques targeting three mechanisms thought to drive dissociation: unhelpful beliefs about dissociation, repetitive thinking, and difficulty tolerating strong emotions. Nine NHS patients aged 16–23 each received four CBT sessions in a single case experimental design. Results were limited by unstable measurements but suggested that targeting unhelpful beliefs reduced distress about dissociation. Targeting repetitive thinking showed little effect, while targeting emotional intolerance showed a weak positive signal. Participants said the intervention needed more sessions and a broader approach. The findings guide future treatment development for dissociation in youth.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 16, 2025
Computational phenomenology uses models to explain experiences in advanced meditation, such as enhanced well-being, attentional shifts, and minimal phenomenal experiences. A review finds that precision weighting—how the brain adjusts the influence of sensory signals—is a key shared mechanism across models. Early models emphasize top-down attention toward interoception or specific objects, while later models focus on layer-specific precision re-weighting within the meditator's hierarchical generative model. Few models address increased cognitive flexibility or learning from meditation, and mechanisms behind compassion traditions remain underexplored. Addressing these gaps is crucial for refining computational models of advanced meditation.
PsyArXiv Preprints
June 15, 2025
The B-Man Stra/Tac model proposes that consciousness is not a product of complex brain activity but resides in a single cellular structure called the organon. Drawing on Nagel's philosophical arguments about subjective experience and Penrose's interpretation of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, the paper explores the implications of this hypothesis through a thought experiment: transplanting human consciousness into a bat. The scenario examines whether such a transfer would allow a human to authentically experience bat life, considering memory, identity, and functionality under both conventional and alternative theories of consciousness. The model challenges dominant neuroscientific views by locating consciousness in a discrete biological unit rather than emergent neural processes.